Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Siona-Secoya hunters of the northwest Amazon strive to maximize short-term yields to provision their households with meat. The observed patterns of hunting more closely resemble the predictions of optimal foraging theory (OFT) than they do a conservation ethic. In the past the Siona-Secoya worried little about conservation because they believed that good shamans attracted abundant game. When hunting was poor, shamans performedyagé ceremonies and appealed to supernatural gamekeepers for the release of more animals from the underworld. The sustainability of Siona-Secoya (...) hunting was aided by factors such as low human population density, dispersed settlements within large hunting territories, settlement movement, and limited hunting technology. Today, increasing involvement in the national economy is leading the Siona-Secoya to invest more time in agriculture and wage labor, and less in traditional foraging activities. Colonization, deforestation, and industrial pollution now pose the greatest threats to wildlife in eastern Ecuador. Because of these changes, the Siona-Secoya are becoming interested in environmental protection and conservation. Several of their efforts to protect forest resources and mitigate pollution are discussed and evaluated. (shrink)

Corruption devours profits, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders promote ethical behaviors. We develop a first-stage moderated mediation theoretical model, explore the intricate relationships between ethical leadership and employee ethical behaviors, and treat ethical climate and organizational justice as dual mediators and leaders’ moral attentiveness as a moderator. We investigate leadership from two perspectives—leaders’ self-evaluation of moral attentiveness and members’ perceptions of ethical leadership. We theorize: These dual mediation mechanisms are more robust for high moral leaders than low moral leaders. (...) Our three-wave data collected from multiple sources, 236 members and 98 immediate supervisors in the Republic of Iraq, support our theory. Specifically, ethical leadership robustly impacts organizational justice’s intensity and magnitude, leading to high employee ethical behaviors when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. However, ethical leadership only influences the ethical climate’s intensity but has no impact on the magnitude when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. Therefore, organizational justice is a more robust mediator than the ethical climate in the omnibus context of leader moral attentiveness. Our findings support Western theory and constructs, demonstrating a new theory for Muslims in Arabic’s emerging markets. Individual decision-makers apply their values as a lens to frame their concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts to maximize their expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness. Ethical leadership trickles down to employee ethical behaviors, providing practical implications for improving the ethical environment, corporate social responsibility, leader-member exchange, business ethics, and economic potentials in the global competitive markets. (shrink)

Preadolescence is an important period for the consolidation of certain arithmetic facts, and the development of problem-solving strategies. Obese subjects seem to have poorer academic performance in math than their normal-weight peers, suggesting a negative effect of obesity on math skills in critical developmental periods. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials were collected during a delayed-verification math task using simple addition and subtraction problems in obese [above 95th body mass index percentile] and non-obese preteens with different levels of math skill; (...) thirty-one with low math skills and thirty-one with high math skills. No significant differences between weight groups were observed in task accuracy regardless of their mathematical skill level. For ERPs, electrophysiological differences were found only in the subtraction condition; participants with obesity showed an electrophysiologic pattern associated with a reduced ability to allocate attention resources regardless of their math skill level, these differences were characterized by longer P300 latency than their normal-weight peers. Moreover, the participants with obesity with high math skills displayed hypoactivity in left superior parietal lobule compared with their normal-weight peers. Additionally, obese preteens with low math skills displayed smaller arithmetic N400 amplitude than non-obese participants, reflecting difficulties in retrieving visual, semantic, and lexical information about numbers. We conclude that participants with obesity are less able than their normal-weight peers to deploy their attention regardless of their behavioral performance, which seems to have a greater effect on obese participants with low math skills because they also show problems in the retrieval of solutions from working memory, resulting in a delay in the development of mathematical skills. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required (...) to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety ; no CP and high anxiety ; CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness... (shrink)

Introduction: how John the Baptist kept his head, or my life in film philosophy -- A philosophical perspective. Why not realize your world? -- Silence and stasis -- Film and modernity -- André Bazin as Cavellian realist -- On Stanley Cavell's band wagon -- What becomes of the camera in the world on film? -- Studies in criticism. "I never thought I would sink so low as to become an actor": John Barrymore in Twentieth century -- James Stewart in Vertigo (...) -- Hats off to George Cukor! -- Woody Allen's New York -- Blood is thicker than water: the family in Hitchcock -- Space and speech in the films of Yasujiro Ozu -- Romance, eroticism and the camera's gaze in Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour -- Face to face with Chantal Akerman -- Precious memories in philosophy and film -- Seeing the light in The tree of life -- A film that is also a handshake: philosophy in the films of the Dardenne Brothers -- Justifying justified -- Documentary film in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s -- Sometimes daddies don't talk about things like that -- Jean Rouch as film artist -- Dancing with Gardner: Robert Gardner's films on art -- Dead birds re-encountered: a journey of return -- Notes on the essays. (shrink)

On june 13th, the Belgian voters had to choose their representatives in four assemblies: the European Parliament, the Chamber of Representatives, the Senate, and the Regional Council of either the Flemish, the Walloon or the Brussels Capital regions accordingly.Thus these elections made it possible to measure possible differences in the results a same list obtained in the different polls. These differences could be observed for some lists, but not for all and were essentially due to the personality of certain candidates (...) rather than to a political will to differentiate, with the exception perhaps of the Ecologists, who traditionally perform better in European elections.These elections also saw an increased use of computer based voting: some 44 % of the registered voters had to express their choice via a computer screen. As a consequence one observed a sensitive drop in "blank and spoilt" ballots.The elections have been characterized by several phenomena. First, there was a marked decline, amounting to some 10 % of the votes, in the support for the parties of the outgoing majority: christian democrats and socialists. In losing each somewhat less than 5 %, they have both hit their historical low and together no langer hold a simpte majority in Parliament.The liberal family bas become the largest in Belgium, which had never accured since the introduction of the single vote system. This first position was conquered more through the decline in the results of the socialists and the christian democrats than via a true advance of the liberals. Though the Flemish component of the liberals progressed by 1.14 %, the French-speaking wing receded by 0.13 %.The overall winners of the elections are the ecologists who on the whole climb from 8. 44 % to 14.36 %. This progression is ho wever proportionately much more marked for the French-speaking component than for the Flemish part. Ecolo bas become the thirdmost important party of Wallonia and the second one in Brussels, whereas Agalev remains the fifth party in Flanders.The extremist parties have had diverging results. The extreme left remains altogether very marginal in Belgium, whereas the extreme right appears to be a typically Flemish phenomenon. Indeed, the Vlaams Blok increases its share of votes by 3.12 % and with 15.31 % has become the third party in Flanders and thereby even surpasses somewhat the result obtained by the VN.V in 1939.The French-speaking extreme right suffered a decline due among others to internal divisions and only stands for 4.09 % in Wallonia and 4 % in Brussels. As a consequence of these results the composition of the assemblies has changed drastically. To constitute a government holding a simpte majority in the Chamber of Representatives, one needs at least three political families or two families and the support of another party. In the Flemish parliament, one needs either a three party coalition, but necessarily comprising the CVP, or a four party coalition to obtain a majority. In the Walloon parliament, a two party coalition is only possible if the PS participates.In Brussels, the Vlaams Blok, although passing from 2 to 4 seats, bas not succeeded in paralysing the functioning of the institutions as this party didn't obtain the majority in the Flemish group.Opinion polls held before the elections had forecast the direction in which votes would shift, but not the extent. The dioxine crisis bas reinforced this shift and has undoubtedly accentuated the progression of the ecologist lists. (shrink)

After four years of a so called «Rainbow» coalition, which had the support of the Socialists, the Liberals and the Greens, the electorate rewarded the first two political families and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Greens. The latter lost nearly 60 % of their electorate, which had occurred only once before to a political party since the introduction of universal suffrage in Belgium in 1919. The outcome of the elections is fairly similar in the three regions of the country.In (...) Flanders, the Socialists progress by more than 8 %, reaping the benefits of the alliance formed with «Spirit», one of the successor parties of the former Volksunie. Half of the Socialists' progress can be attributed to this effect. Moreover, the Socialist party started off from an absolute low hit in 1999 and has not regained its top scores of the 1960s. The advance of the Liberal VLD is more modest,, but it followed upon excellent previous results. With some 25 % of the vote, the VLD, which is the first party in Flanders, has reached an absolute high.Conversely, the Christian Democrats of the CD&V slightly regress, thereby continuing a downward trend. These results take them to their historical low, and make them into Flanders ' third party, with some 21.9 % of the vote. Agalev, the Green party, no langer has any representation in parliarnent and falls back from11 to 3.85 %. The far right, the Vlaams Blok, continues its advance and reaches 17,86 %, an increase of2,5 %.In Wallonia too one observes a significant advance of the Socialists. The PS remains the first party in the South of the country with 36.39 % of the vote, progressing by 7 %. It exceeds all its results of the previous twelve years, without however reaching its earlier highs. The Liberals of the Mouvement Réformateur gain 3.65 % and are at their historical high with 28.38 % of the vote. The Christian Democrats, under the denomination CDH slip back by some 1.5 %, but this decline is almost equivalent to the result of a dissident list of the CDH, which had wanted to maintain «christian» as a reference. This doesn't alter the fact that the Christian Democrats have also reached their all time low.The Greens, Ecolo, lose some 57 % of their vote and stand at 7.45 %. In contrast with 1999, one observes a slight advance ofthe Front National, a far right party, that only obtained 5.56 % of the vote however. With the exception ofan increase in the French and a decline in the Flemish vote, the Brussels districts show the same characteristics as the two other regions of the country; a very significant advance of the Socialists, a slight increase in the Liberal vote, the collapse of the Greens; the status quo ofthe Christian Democrats and an advance of the far right with almost 2 %.The 2003 election therefore seems to be a correction on the 1999 one, where the advance of the greens had been amplified by the dioxineJood scare. But the width of the swing makes it into one of the elections where the volatility of the vote will have been the highest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:191 A PERSONAL ELEMENT IN MORALITY In his quest for the truth about moral life, Hume steers between the Scylla of Sentiment and the Charybdis of Reason. Sentiment operating alone, as a basis for morality, would threaten to engulf humanity with as many relativistic moral truths as there are individuals. Reason alone would produce objective, impersonal truths, but these would be powerless to move us. Hume's developed theory ingeniously (...) shows how Reason and Sentiment can operate together, to produce judgments based on feelings which are nonetheless impersonal and objective (T 581-584; E 227-229). Hume is acutely aware (as we shall see below) that there exists a considerable disparity between the impartiality required of us by moral theory and what in practice people think when it comes to moral matters. There would seem to be only two ways of accommodating this fact. One is to regard the disparity as a mark of the moral mediocrity of ordinary people; we are not as objective in our judgments as we could be. The other way is to treat the disparity as a token of failure and inadequacy in the theory; our best philosophical reasoning about morals fails to capture its subject matter without distortion. Our rational powers fall short, not only in Book I of the Treatise, where the task is to explain the foundation of our beliefs, but also in Book III, where Hume attempts to elucidate moral life. Certainly the first way would reduce the gap to some extent; some people, perhaps many, are moral truly low achievers. I want to show that Hume also suggests the second way; he is willing to deflate the 192 pretensions of philosophy, even when it comes to his own state-of-the-art efforts. I. The Objectivity of Certain Feeling-Based Judgments In the moral arena of life we make judgments which are based on feelings, on 'certain sentiments of pleasure or disgust' (T 581). "To have the sense of virtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character" (T 471). Of course not just any feeling will do; it must be of a peculiar kind, which we can experience only under specific conditions. At first Hume characterizes the necessary condition as follows: 'Tis only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil (T 472). Later on Hume provides a fuller account. Characteristically he elaborates in response to an anticipated objection. The objection is that our sympathetic feelings of pleasure and pain fluctuate wildly, depending mainly upon our distance, so to speak, from the character we assess, in space, time, and kind of relationship. Our moral judgments do not vary in this way; we give the same approbation to the same moral qualities in China as in England (T 581). So (it is concluded) our moral judgments do not rest upon sympathy. Hume's response is that, as a necessary condition for moral judgment and communication, we must "fix on some steady and general points of view" (T 581-2). He proceeds to employ an analogy with our situation regarding perception of (and communication about) the things which make up our common world. 193 Here a man obviously cannot consider things 'only as they appear from his peculiar point of view' (T 581). For instance I cannot describe my desk to a friend by reporting on how I perceive it at this moment — because at this moment the light is dim and I am standing across the room from the desk. If I were to do a painting of the scene before me, the desk would be black, its top a trapezoid shape on the canvas. What I say, however, is that I have a walnut desk of a medium brown color and it has a rectangular top. I say, in effect, how the desk would look under standard conditions of light and perspective. In the Enquiry version Hume spells out his analogy more fully. Again he addresses the case in which our sentiments, e.g., about two men, one distant and... (shrink)

As scientific and engineering efforts become increasingly global in nature, the need to understand differences in perceptions of research ethics issues across countries and cultures is imperative. However, investigations into the connection between nationality and ethical decision-making in the sciences have largely generated mixed results. In Study 1 of this paper, a measure of biases and compensatory strategies that could influence ethical decisions was administered. Results from this study indicated that graduate students from the United States and international graduate students (...) studying in the US are prone to different biases. Based on these findings, recommendations are made for developing ethics education interventions to target these decision-making biases. In Study 2, we employed an ethics training intervention based on ethical sensemaking and used a well-established measure of ethical decision-making that more fully captures the content of ethical judgment. Similar to Study 1, the results obtained in this study suggest differences do exist between graduate students from the US and international graduate students in ethical decision-making prior to taking the research ethics training. However, similar effects were observed for both groups following the completion of the ethics training intervention. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi was one of the great figures of European intellectual life in the 20th century. A highly acclaimed physical chemist in the first period of his career who became a celebrated philosopher after World War II, Polanyi taught in Germany, England, and the United States and associated with many of the leading intellects of his time. His biography has remained unwritten partly because his many and scattered interests in a wide variety of fields, including six subfields of physical chemistry, (...) epistemology, economics, patent law, social and political theory, aesthetics, and theology. This long-awaited volume will be the definitive resource on Polanyi and his work. (shrink)

The alleged emergence of a ‘post-truth’ regime links the rise of new forms of social media and the reemergence of political populism. Post-truth has theoretical roots in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, with sociologists of science arguing that both true and false claims should be explained by the same kinds of social causes. Most STS theorists have sought to deflect blame for post-truth, while at the same time enacting a normative turn, looking to deconstruct truth claims and (...) subject expertise to criticism. Steve Fuller has developed a positive case for post-truth in science, arguing that post-truth democratizes science. I criticize this argument and suggest an alternative approach that draws on the prehistory of the field in the 1930s and 1940s, when philosophers and sociologists sought to define the social conditions necessary for reliable knowledge production that might stem mass media irrationalism. (shrink)

Abstract:This study tests the usefulness of a person-situation interactionist framework in examining the willingness of a salesperson to lie to get an order. Using a survey of 389 salespersons, our results demonstrate that organizational relationships influence willingness to lie. Specifically, salespersons are less willing to lie to their own company than to their customer, than to a channel partner, and finally, than to a competitor firm. Furthermore, respondents from firms with a clear and positive ethical climate are less willing to (...) lie. Finally, our study finds that interactions between personality factors, such as high Machiavellianism and high self-monitoring, and situational factors have an impact on willingness to lie. Our results suggest that firms can take steps to influence employee ethical behavior. (shrink)

Steve Fuller has replied to my critique of his endorsement of a post-truth epistemology. I trace the divergence in our approach to social epistemology by examining our distinct responses to the principle of symmetry in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Fuller has extended the concept of symmetry and challenged the field to embrace a post-truth condition that flattens the difference between experts and the public. By contrast, I have criticized the concept of symmetry for policing the field to rule ideology (...) critique out of court. I argue that a focus on post-truth populism obscures the role of counter-elites and ideologies that restrict political choice. A better way to promote democracy would be to support minority positions within science that promise to open up suppressed political possibilities and to seek the coordinated use of different disciplines to address significant public problems. (shrink)

Recent work on Imre Lakatos’s missing Hungarian dissertation on the historical sociology of science sheds new light on his mature philosophy of science. Remembered primarily as an “internalist” defender of the autonomy of science, and a Cold Warrior in poli­tics, commentators have mistaken his contribution as primarily a rearguard action against the followers of Thomas Kuhn and the “externalists” influenced by Boris Hessen. It comes as a surprise, then, to find that he developed and retained a fully general soci­ology of (...) scientific knowledge, with Marxist roots that articulated Lenin’s “inexhaustible atom.” He carried forward this emphasis on the fallible, changing, and incomplete nature of our engagement with the natural world by a dialectical account of how research programs advance and recede historically. In his effort to develop a synthesis of Popper and Kuhn, and via his engagement with Paul Feyerabend, he continued to develop a distinctly dialectical ap­proach to science. (shrink)

Key to Steve Fuller’s recent defense of intelligent design is the claim that it alone can explain why science is even possible. By contrast, Fuller argues that Darwinian evolutionary theory posits a purposeless universe leaving humans with no motivation to study science and no basis for modifying an underlying reality. I argue that this view represents a retreat from insights about knowledge within Fuller’s own program of social epistemology. I argue for a Darwinian picture of science as a product of (...) cultural evolution building upon biological capabilities and liabilities bequeathed to us by biological evolution. Dual Inheritance or Gene-Culture Coevolution Theory can help us understand how complex social institutions emerged out of distinct, if connected, processes of biological and cultural evolution. Only by understanding how the unnatural nature of modern science emerged through cultural evolution can we consider where modern science functions well or poorly. (shrink)

In his new book, Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History, Steve Fuller returns to core themes of his program of social epistemology that he first outlined in his 1988 book, Social Epistemology. He develops a new, unorthodox theology and philosophy building upon his testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in defense of intelligent design, leading to a call for maximal human experimentation. Beginning from the theological premise rooted in the Abrahamic religious tradition that we are created in the (...) image of God, Fuller argues that the spark of the divine within us distinguishes us from animals. I argue that Fuller’s recent work takes us away from key insights of his original work. In contrast, I advocate for a program of social epistemology rooted in evolutionary science rather than intelligent design, emphasize a precautionary and ecological approach rather than a proactionary approach that favors risky human experimentation, and attend to our material and sociological embeddedness rather than a transhumanist repudiation of the body. (shrink)

The article examines and extends work bringing together engineering ethics and Science and Technology Studies, which had built upon Diane Vaughan’s analysis of the Challenger shuttle accident as a test case. Reconsidering the use of her term “normalization of deviance,” the article argues for a middle path between moralizing against and excusing away engineering practices contributing to engineering disaster. To explore an illustrative pedagogical case and to suggest avenues for constructive research developing this middle path, it examines the emergence of (...) green chemistry and green engineering. Green chemistry began when Paul Anastas and John Warner developed a set of new rules for chemical synthesis that sought to learn from missed opportunities to avoid environmental damage in the twentieth century, an approach that was soon extended to engineering as well. Examination of tacit assumptions about historical counterfactuals in recent, interdisciplinary discussions of green chemistry illuminate competing views about the field’s prospects. An integrated perspective is sought, addressing how both technical practice within chemistry and engineering and the influence of a wider “social movement” can play a role in remedying environmental problems. (shrink)

Distinctive features of culture industries suggest that women culture workers face formidable barriers to career advancement. Using longitudinal data on the careers of screenwriters, we examine gender inequality in the labor market for writers of feature films. We hypothesize and test three different models of labor market dynamics and find support for a model of cumulative disadvantage whereby the gender gap in earnings grows as men and women move through their careers. We suggest that the transition of screenwriting from a (...) mixed to a male-dominated occupation parallels the “empty field” phenomenon described in a study by Tuchman of nineteenth-century novelists. The institutionalization of male dominance of the film industry in the 1930s and the typecasting of women writers has had a lasting impact on gender inequality, which shows little change through the early 1990s. (shrink)